The last time Michael Mosley investigated healthy eating fads, the whole country went on an intermittent starvation diet. Dr Mike didn’t invent the 5/2 regime, where dieters fast twice a week, but he spotted the trend before most people.

His latest experiment, to double the amount of red meat he ate, seems to be lagging sadly behind fashions. We’ve been hearing about protein-rich diets for a decade, with celebrities tucking in like Desperate Dan to undercooked steaks the size of tennis rackets.

Dr Mike wasn’t that greedy on Horizon: Should I Eat Meat? (BBC Two). His idea of pigging out on meat was to have a couple of rashers of bacon in the morning, and a burger at night. Millions of Britons these days eat more than that for a fast food snack, while they’re wondering what to have for lunch.

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Dr Mike Mosley wasn’t that greedy. His idea of pigging out on meat was to have a couple of rashers of bacon in the morning, and a burger at night

It’s as though he’d announced an investigation into the effects of heavy drinking by pledging to down a whole glass of wine every day.

Dr Mike always has a clutch of terrifying statistics. His documentaries are more frightening than an evening spent Googling medical symptoms. With that faintly concerned smile of his, he warned that eating beef just three times a week could double your risk of heart disease.

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Consuming any meat at all meant you were 20 per cent more likely to die this year. By the time he’d finished reeling off the numbers, it appeared that a plate of bangers and mash was more lethal than a one-way ticket to Dignitas in Switzerland.

But then he undermined himself, by declaring: ‘There is little evidence that chicken poses a danger.’ That directly contradicts what one food expert told me earlier this month, that supermarket chicken is now so stewed in superbugs that it could prove fatal just to wash one under the kitchen tap, because bacteria will splash everywhere.

Dr Mike: Consuming any meat at all meant you were 20 per cent more likely to die this year. By the time he’d finished reeling off the numbers, it appeared that a plate of bangers and mash was more lethal than a one-way ticket to Dignitas in Switzerland

There is so much contradictory evidence surrounding what we eat that the only sane response is to ignore it all. This documentary made that easier, by including long segments of exceptionally dull footage — Dr Mike getting into his car, Dr Mike driving, Dr Mike parking.

MARITAL DUST-UP OF THE WEEK

‘We could have been by a pool in Spain or Tenerife or Majorca,’ she complained.

‘Majorca is Spain,’ snapped Ken. ‘So is Tenerife, come to that.’

Oh Deirdre . . . never pick a battle of words with a pedant.

He didn’t talk to camera in these sections: statistics, after all, prove you’re 37 per cent more likely to have an accident behind the wheel while reciting a script to a TV crew.

But when he did open his mouth, he could be inadvertently entertaining. In California, visiting a family of vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists, he became exaggeratedly British. ‘Helay!’ he greeted them. ‘Oh, helay there!’

And in their church, joining in the hymns, he did that terribly English thing of singing loudly and tunelessly, quite unaware of the sidelong glances from the Adventists.

He seemed to spend the entire hour shuttling between London and Los Angeles. By the end of the show he had put on half a stone — perhaps it was all the airline snacks.

Dennis Waterman’s curmudgeonly old copper, Gerry, had no intention of visiting the States, as New Tricks (BBC One) returned for an eleventh series. When his daughter’s new boyfriend used an Americanism, saying ‘rough corners’ instead of ‘tough streets’, Gerry bit his head off — ‘This is Bermondsey, not Baltimore!’

Whatever you call them, it was the crime-ridden estates of south London that made this edition of New Tricks a real return to form.

They're back for an eleventh series (from ledt to righr): Dennis Waterman, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Tamsin Outhwaite and Denis Lawson

The previous series opened with a jaunt to Gibraltar, and it’s always a bad sign when a long-established show feels the need to head abroad for inspiration.

This time, the Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad stayed on their own doorstep, with a storyline that highlighted the gulf between cynical Gerry and brainy idealist Danny, played by Nicholas Lyndhurst with a plumstone in his mouth.

One moment, when they almost blew a surveillance operation as they bickered about which one of them had earned the call-sign ‘Bravo One’ on their walkie-talkies, was a bit of comedy worthy of their classic shows from 30 years ago — Minder and Only Fools And Horses.

New Tricks is a reliable ratings workhorse for BBC One. On this evidence, the schedulers can count on it for many years yet.